After a busy 2016 and an impressive three years, we are getting ready to bid a fond farewell to recent M.S. Melissa Althouse.   Melissa went into the summer with her first peer-reviewed paper accepted into the journal Waterbirds.   She then spent 12 weeks in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's Directorate Resource Assistant Fellows Program, where she analyzed and summarized opportunities for conservation and migration of saltmarsh throughout Southern New England.    On November 28, Melissa did a fantastic job defending her M.S. thesis, "Behavioral and Demographic Effects of Human Disturbance to Staging Roseate Terns (Sterna dougallii) in the Cape Cod National Seashore".    The majority of the northwest Atlantic population of federally-endangered roseate terns gathers for several weeks at Cape Cod, Massachusetts prior to their long fall migration to South America.  Melissa found that mixed-species tern flocks that included roseates were much more likely to flush in response to human pedestrians than to potential competitor species, even gulls which steal fish from terns that are attempting to feed their young.   She also found that terns at less-disturbed sites tended to spend more time in flight and less in resting and related behaviors than terns at more-disturbed sites.    She provided the seashore with much-needed guidelines for setback distances for human activity around tern flocks.

Melissa's summer fellowship paid off, as she was offered a permanent position with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service after graduation.  Melissa will be a Wildlife Biologist at Erie Natonal Wildlife Refuge in Pennsylvania.   It has been fun having Melissa in our lab, and wish her the best for the next phase of her career!

As the Fall semester came to a close, the Cohen lab celebrated the successful defense of Maureen Durkin's M.S. Thesis, "Impacts of Anthropogenic Disturbance on Breeding Snowy Plovers (Charadrius nivosus) in the Florida Panhandle."    Maureen's thesis work, spanning 120 miles of Florida coastline, compared behavioral and demographic responses of breeding snowy plovers to potential disturbance sources among several sites with varying amounts of recreational use.   She found that birds at lower disturbance sites tended to react to humans at longer distances than birds at higher disturbance sites, and that humans evoked responses from further away than natural predators and competitors but that snowy plovers were most sensitive to dogs.    Much of the current protection effort is focused on nests, but Maureen showed that plovers with broods were highly sensitive to potential disturbance.  Although there was not a clear link between behavioral response to disturbance and reproductive success, she found that proximity to roadways influenced nest survival. 

Maureen is continuing on for her Ph.D. at SUNY-ESF, where she is focused on estimating wildlife road mortality and understanding population limiting factors for snowy plovers in Florida.  Congratulations, Maureen!